A Nearly Perfect Copy: A Novel Read online

  Gabriel wondered if his French was failing him.

  “We didn’t see many of them,” Paulette continued. “Maybe one, or two. But we think that’s your strongest work. They need a little finishing.”

  “Finish them while thinking of your relative, freezing up there in the Low Countries, missing his homeland the way you surely miss yours,” Patrice said.

  Realization came over Gabriel slowly, like the delay of warm air as it blows out a subway grate. “You want Connois.”

  “We want your originals, yes, but ones which echo your ancestor. I’m so glad you understand me. I don’t speak the language of artists, only the language of art appreciators. It is a tremendous failing, I know.” Patrice sounded actually pained. Paulette tittered in the background.

  “Why don’t you come by the space next week?” Paulette asked. “You can see the current show and we can talk over the plans.”

  “Sure,” Gabriel said. “Thanks. Of course. Thanks so much.”

  Gabriel sat on a bench built in a circle around a plane tree. On the other side, an old woman was feeding the pigeons that swarmed her feet out of a Monoprix bag. Whenever they got too close, she kicked them away.

  A show. At a real gallery. Not famous like Ambrosine or de Treu, but maybe even better because it was a gallery that was cooler, that showcased up-and-comers. Could you be an up-and-comer at forty-two? He hoped so, because he was certainly not an already-there, and the only other option was a has-been.

  But they didn’t want him. They wanted Connois. Fuck Connois, Gabriel thought. It was possible that his ancestor had ruined his life. Had made him want to be a painter, had made him forge Febrer, had set him on the path that led him to Klinman.

  He should tell the Picluts to aller se faire foutre. If they didn’t want him, his art, then they could find someone else. Let someone else take their direction, be their little bitch.

  The woman behind him kicked her legs and pigeons fluttered over to Gabriel. He stamped his foot to make them scatter.

  On the other hand, a show was a show. This could really launch him. Maybe what Patrice and Paulette were doing was curating, shaping his work, editing it. Maybe it didn’t matter that it wasn’t his original vision.

  The woman shooed the pigeons over toward Gabriel. He shooed them back.

  Gabriel went directly to Colette’s, stopping only to buy the cheapest champagne he could find.

  “Well, hello!” Colette said, glimpsing the bottle.

  “I got a call from the Picluts today. They want to give me a show there.”

  “I know!” said Colette. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

  “You know? How do you know?”

  “My uncle said they were going to call you. Apparently, he really likes you, to set you up with them that way.”

  “To set me up?”

  “I mean, to put you in contact.”

  Gabriel hid inside his champagne flute. Had Klinman put them up to this? Why?

  His thoughts must have shown on his face, because Colette put an arm on his. “They love your work. They’d have to. Every show figures in a gallery’s reputation. They wouldn’t risk that. Not for anyone.”

  “Do you know how long the gallery has been open?”

  “Three years, I think.”

  “And how long have they been married?” Gabriel asked.

  “Who?”

  “The Picluts.”

  “They’re siblings.”

  “They are?” Gabriel was sure they were married. “I thought they were together.”

  “That’s gross. No, they’re siblings.” Gabriel thought about how they shared telepathic communication, how Patrice put his hand lovingly on Paulette’s back. How had he confused that with romantic love? “Silly,” Colette said. She yawned. “I’m jet-lagged.”

  “Oh, right, how was your trip?”

  “Good. I saw the most beautiful Delacroix.” Colette drained her glass and refilled it, sipping quickly before it fizzed over the side. “It’s upsetting. These people in New York, these Americans, they don’t appreciate what they have.”

  “I appreciate what I have,” Gabriel said, taking Colette’s free hand.

  Colette patted his cheek and said in English, “So cute.”

  The gallery space was exactly how he had imagined it would be. In fact, he thought he’d been in the space in another incarnation. Was it possible that it had been a punk club in the nineties? It was the perfect location for an up-and-coming gallery. Not so trendy that the rents were high, but trendy enough that centre-ville Parisians would feel safe sojourning there, and receive a taste of adventure while doing so. Though small and low-ceilinged, the gallery had a nice flow to it, with plenty of interior walls and new track lighting. Colette came with him, standing so close to him as he paced the room, he could smell her strawberry shampoo.

  She asked Paulette and Patrice a number of practical questions, and they had an animated discussion conducted so rapidly, with so many numbers, that Gabriel couldn’t follow it. It seemed almost like an argument.

  But Gabriel trusted Colette. It had been so long since someone had been his advocate. It felt odd, improbable, yet Gabriel and Colette seemed to share a certain practicality that made Gabriel feel that as long as his and Colette’s interests were aligned—or at least, not competing—he could count on her.

  He smiled as Paulette opened a bottle of champagne, and signed the contract willingly. When they clinked glasses, Colette’s bubbled up and over the rim and she brought it quickly to her mouth to save it. “Now, that’s talent,” Patrice said.

  After work, still nursing one of the more vicious and perseverant hangovers he’d ever experienced (he swore never to drink champagne again), Gabriel shuffled home and got into bed, contemplating his luck. Could it be that it had finally changed? He permitted himself a fantasy in which he was the toast of Paris. He wore a tuxedo, a satin pocket square, shirt partway unbuttoned. Around him was a cast of characters like in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Women in beehive hairdos with long cigarette filters and men with highball glasses. The setting, though, was modern: a view of the Parisian skyline (from in Paris? his common sense asked him. Yes, a view of Paris from Paris). The lighting was perfect for his art and for people watching. Still fantasizing, he looked at the walls. His drawings were professionally mounted and framed. It took him a minute to realize that what he was admiring in the fantasy as his own were the forgeries he’d drawn for Klinman.

  He sat up in bed and turned on the light, embarrassed. Could he really have thought that he achieved this show on his own merit? For all his posturing about his supposed talent and the art world’s prejudice, it was entirely possible that his work was inferior. Plus, he had to reflect that the happiest and most fulfilled he’d felt in years was when he worked for Klinman. To produce so exactingly the work of a master created a greater sense of satisfaction than when he finished his own work. Was that because the drawings were accepted so enthusiastically? Obviously, praise was powerful motivation. And money. Maybe this show was what he needed to get the same commendations for himself. After all, being an art world darling was about opportunity, exposure.

  A thought: Klinman set up the show. But, again, why? So that Gabriel would stay happy and continue to forge his pictures like a good little boy? Should he accept this charity? Should he feel offended? It was hardly life-changing, a small gallery in the Fourteenth on a low-rent block with two-euro wine and stale crackers at the vernissage.

  Or maybe Colette had arranged for the show. Or Édouard. Or even, for all he knew, Didier. The possibilities were endless, and all pointed to the fact that regardless of who prodded the gallery to offer him a show, and regardless of the fact that a solo show was the first step to a career of any kind, Gabriel could only see the offer as further proof that he would never amount to anything. He turned off the light, rolled over, and pulled the covers up over his head, willing himself to sleep.

  Gabriel took great pride in announcing to Édouard that he wou
ld no longer be working at the Rosenzweig Gallery in order to prepare for his solo show. Édouard didn’t look impressed, nor did he seem upset to hear that his employee would be leaving him. There were a dozen recent grads who would be glad to take his place. Édouard insisted that he stay two weeks to train a new hire, but Gabriel refused. Only then did Édouard show emotion. They fought, and it escalated to the point where Gabriel told Édouard exactly what he thought of him and his gallery. Édouard responded in kind, hurtling insults that sounded just like the characteristics about himself that Gabriel already knew and hated: his attitude, his intractability, the suspicion that if he hadn’t made it in the art world by now he never would.

  But going to the studio at ten the next morning, Gabriel was elated. This was what an artist did, got up, drank oodles of coffee, and hit the studio early. He practically sauntered from the métro. He was not the first one there; Marie-Laure was an early riser. Still, Gabriel felt virtuous, pumped from caffeine.

  Over the weekend, Gabriel had cleaned out his area in the studio, considering canvases and putting aside those he could re-gesso and paint over. He made a list of possible titles for his show. But after stretching two canvases and priming them, he was at a loss as to what to paint. It might help if he had a theme for his show. But he couldn’t really develop a theme until he’d painted something. A vicious circle. He paced; he ran out of batteries in his tape player and switched their places to eke out a bit more power. Then he went outside.

  Didier was having a cigarette. “How’s it going?”

  “Oh, you know,” Gabriel said.

  “Christ, when I first found out about my show,” Didier continued, “I couldn’t do anything. It’s like all my ideas had been sucked out of my head. Do you feel like that?”

  “No,” Gabriel lied. “I’m painting like they will cut my arms off tomorrow.”

  “Nice image,” Didier said. “Lucky. It took me like a month to settle down and produce. You got a title yet?”

  “Still thinking,” Gabriel said.

  “Don’t think too hard,” Didier warned. “Thinking makes for bad art.”

  Lise was impressed by Gabriel’s sudden success. She was full of questions. He did not tell her about having to tailor his paintings to the Picluts’ requests, because he knew she would disapprove. She would wrinkle up her little French nose and scold him like a child. Why was he compromising himself that way? Why had he been true to his art all these years, only to sell out now? What did that make him?

  Gabriel was aware of her arguments, because he was making them himself. Why should it matter to him what she thought, this artist-turned-housewife? Except it did.

  Sitting in a café near Ambrosine’s, Lise had dedicated her lunch break to brainstorming a title for his show with him. They were talking about Gabriel’s interests, how alienation was always a theme in his works, and they discussed the possibility of the title aliénation, then two words in English, alien nation, and they laughed that they were filming a sci-fi movie. Then it came to Lise. She had to write it down so Gabriel could see the wordplay. “Dé/placement, Dé/plaisir.”

  “ ‘Dis/placement, Dis/pleasure.’ I’m happy,” he blurted out. He blushed. He was happy that Lise was his friend, happy to be having a show at last.

  Lise laughed. “I’m happy too.”

  When he told Colette the title, she scoffed. “It sounds like some sort of Derridean circle jerk.”

  “Well, I like it,” Gabriel said.

  “You would.”

  He was sleeping poorly, partly because he was often at Colette’s and her bed was lumpy. She also generated so much heat when she slept that he awoke sweaty and breathless. Every night he had anxiety nightmares.

  One night he dreamed that his painting had made the cover of Art Forum, only to realize, to his horror, that he had copied the Mona Lisa. He awoke panting.

  “What is it? Tell me.” Colette stroked his back as Gabriel fought to regain his breath.

  “Am I doing the wrong thing?” he asked her.

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “I feel like … I feel like I’m pretending to be someone else.”

  “Because you’re accepting direction?”

  “I guess.” He turned to her. “Doesn’t it seem strange that they want to capitalize on my connection to Connois?”

  “Why?” Colette lay back down on the bed. Her breasts pointed opposite ways, like contradictory directional arrows. “I mean, you exploit it.”

  “Yeah, but. Wait, I do?”

  Colette laughed. “You have his name, though it’s not your true name. You like to sketch like him, I’ve noticed.”

  Gabriel froze: was it possible she knew about the work he did for her uncle? But Colette continued on. “Just do what they want. Now is not the time for principles. You don’t catch flies with vinegar.”

  Part Two

  Summer 2007

  Elm

  Elm felt such a surge of relief as the wheels lifted off the ground that she sighed more heavily than she meant to and felt her seatmate bristle in annoyance. She loved her family, but escaping from them, even for a couple of days, lifted a tremendous burden. She felt she was never doing enough. When she expressed to Colin, lost in his own anxious space, that she worried about her efforts as a wife and mother, he looked at her as though she were speaking a language he didn’t understand.

  “That is so New York, to worry about these things,” he said. “You’re a terrific wife and a fantastic mother and a terrible cook. All my girlfriends say so.” He nuzzled her. “I don’t understand why you worry like this when there’s real stuff to worry about, like aliens and serial killers.” He was being nice, but he wasn’t saying the right words. What were those words? Some form of assurance that she didn’t let her son die, that everyone forgave her for letting her son die.

  New York fell away, replaced by a blue that was either ocean or cloud cover. She was flying business class; she reclined and sipped at her not-terrible wine.

  It had been a fight to get to go on this trip alone. Ian had wanted to come, even offering to pay his own way, claiming not to have been to Paris in ages. She had laughed like he made some ridiculous joke, but she would have been blind not to see the hurt in his eyes. Then Colin had suggested she take Moira with her. “She’s never been to France, Elm.” Elm wondered if he needed a break as much as she did. “I’ll be working too much,” she answered. “I’d have to find a sitter.”

  Colette had, if unintentionally, helped Elm out. Needing to see Klinman’s stock was the perfect excuse to take a trip to Paris. Ordinarily, it was the dealer who came to the auction house, but Elm agreed with the man’s assessment that he didn’t want the works traveling unnecessarily; each minute they spent out of prime archival conditions was a year off their lives. It would be dangerous to ship them to New York. Easier to ship Elm to Paris. No one would ever have to know her real impetus.

  But here she was finally, unencumbered. She made it uneventfully through customs, dragging her overnight bag with a few clothes and a couple of reference books. The taxi driver seemed surprised that she was staying on the Left Bank instead of the Champs-Élysées. Klinman too had been surprised, as had the mystery man at the clinic; apparently only backpackers tried to recapture the dirty glamour of the 1960s. She checked into her room; the hotel had no elevator so she climbed the two sets of carpeted stairs with a baggage porter in tow. She tipped him one euro, which he received silently so that she had no clue if she’d tipped him appropriately.

  The small room was decorated in a faux Louis XIV style, lots of ormolu and brocade, but the window, when she pulled the curtain, looked out onto the back side of the Luxembourg Gardens. Across the patchy green she could see the busy Boulevard Saint-Michel.

  She hadn’t visited Paris since Ronan died. But though he’d never been to Paris, the city reminded her of him; it was the site of Elm’s first solo trip after becoming a mother. He was a little over fourteen months, and she’d ins
isted that Colin put him on the phone every evening though he didn’t understand that the voice coming through the receiver was hers. “Yes, he misses you,” Colin said. “No, I haven’t fed him refined sugar. Wait—is Guinness refined sugar?”

  Paris bustled beneath her, the snarl of traffic heading up the boulevard haphazardly like a group of beetles, the high-pitched claxons of hooting taxis. Here was a city where she knew no one, where no one knew she’d been Ronan’s mother. This feeling was simultaneously thrilling and devastating. She could be free. She was not under examination as a woman who had lost a child. The flipside of being where no one knew about Ronan was the feeling that all traces of him had been erased from the collective unconscious. She wanted to tell people on the street, “I had a son,” just so there would be some recognition of him. She tried to insert him into her memories of Paris: the smoky cabaret where the fat Frenchman stroked the older lady’s hair, some of which fell out in clumps between his thick fingers; the brushed-clean streets and the whir of the machines as they sprayed water into the gutters. Ronan would have delighted as the fountain went off in front of the Centre Pompidou, or at least, a young version would have. An older version would have enjoyed the Bateaux Mouches, or a tour of the sewers and catacombs. But all these fake memories were like a reel of movie pastiches. She would have to live without Ronan for the weekend, except for the DNA samples she’d brought: the hairbrush she’d kept from Thailand, and a baby tooth retrieved from a plastic box that Ronan had insisted they keep his teeth in once he realized that the Tooth Fairy didn’t exist.

  She stood at the window in her room until night fell and it was a decent hour to venture out for dinner. She had with her Pedrocco’s book on Canaletto; with a decent Bordeaux she could try to make the evening pleasant. But even as she thought this she knew she was only going through the motions of a person visiting Paris. She was playing the role of “Elm” and simply waiting until she could shed her cover and visit the clinic. The knowledge simmered underneath her skin. She felt elated; the strange lack of jet lag was like a turbo boost of energy. She remembered a bistro not too far from the hotel. It had changed names, but the decor and the menu remained the same (did bistro menus ever change?), and they sat her at a table by the window so she could watch the people go by. The waiter patiently suffered through her nervous babbling in inferior French, her debate about whether to order steak tartare, and her eventual decision to have the roast chicken, because, she added, no one roasted chicken better than the French. The waiter took the menu and bowed slightly. Elm wondered if she’d said what she thought she’d said. She often made mistakes in French that were hilarious and sexual—commenting on the length of dicks outside the opera, or talking about how her grandfather liked to hunt twats.